For Orange County employees who enjoyed staying at the Dana Point Marina Inn, there was a special perk: a tab of $35 a night. That’s $1,050 per month, way below the $1,848 county median apartment rent. The employee perk, since discontinued, came out in an audit released Wednesday by Auditor-Controller Eric Woolery.

The inn’s website currently lists rooms “from $133 per night.” The audit is part of what Mr. Woolery, in a recent meeting with the Register Editorial Board, said was his goal “to be the taxpayer’s watchdog.”

In the Register summary, the “unauthorized program granted steeply discounted room rates to some Orange County employees, contractors and their friends.” These “including top managers who oversaw the hotel’s contracts with the county – and their friends and relatives.” Over the past six years, the discounts were issued “at least 988 times by numerous people,” costing the county $62,000 in lost revenue.

Maybe that’s not a lot in a proposed county budget of $6.1 billion for fiscal 2016-17, which begins July 1. But a greater question is: Why does the county even own a hotel? Supervisor Shawn Nelson told us the Marina Inn is part of the county-owned Dana Point Harbor complex, which has been developed over several decades for “people who don’t have a house on the beach, but can have access to all the amenities” of beach living.

Mr. Nelson said selling the whole complex would be “kind of like selling John Wayne Airport” and would “involve complexities with the California Coastal Commission,” which supervises just about everything that goes on along the coast. However, he added, “We sure don’t want to be in the hotel business.”

Great Western Hotels Corp. is under contract to manage the hotel for the county through 2019. Mr. Nelson said a possibility is “a long-term ground lease” put up for auction. Next question, he added, would be whether there would be “one master lease” or separate leases for the hotel, shops, restaurants, locker rooms and other entities.

We urge the Board of Supervisors to act on this strategy, to maximize revenue that can be used for other other budget items.